Blog - Page 65

A collection of 2,459 blog posts

Content MarketingOct 29, 2015
Buffer’s Marketing Manifesto in 500 Words

Treat every piece of content—every tweet, every Facebook post, every CTA, every press outreach email—with the utmost care. There needs to be a bit of an internal struggle when we hit send or publish, if we don’t feel it, I don’t think it’ll be good enough. This shouldn’t be confused with perfectionism, we want to push things out with consistency and without lingering. This is about self-discipline to go through that struggle—even if it’s felt ever so slightly—every single time. We don’t want

Self-ImprovementOct 29, 2015
The Humility-Confidence SeeSaw: The Untold Secret of Great Leaders

Try to think back to a time when you felt incredibly confident. You instinctively knew you could handle whatever came at you. You were on top of things, making all the right moves. You were in the zone. It’s an amazing feeling, and one that we’d probably all like to have more often. The book The Confidence Code gets right to the point of why this element is so crucial in our lives: “Scholars are co

OpenOct 28, 2015
The Best Time For Transparency Is When It’s The Hardest

When people learn about our devotion to transparency at Buffer, there tends to be one big question that looms large. Here’s the gist of it: “Transparency seems like a great policy when things are going great. But what about when they’re not?” Ed Fry summed up this often-asked question quite perfectly during an “Ask Me Anything” session [http://inbound.org/discussion/view/we-make-run-and-grow-buffer-ask-us-anyth

Tips / How ToOct 28, 2015
Marketing Automation: How to Scale Things That Don’t Scale

What sets winning businesses apart from the competition? Automation is one edge. The Lenskold Group found that 63% of companies that are outgrowing their competitors use marketing automation. What is an underrated way to drive more conversions? Again, automation. Companies that use marketing automation also see 53% higher conversion rates than non-users, according to the Aberdeen Group. All of which raises the question: What kind of marketing automation are these winning businesses doing? An

OpenOct 27, 2015
The Untold Story of Buffer’s Values: Why We Created Them, and Why It Hurt

What motivates you to do your best work ? In an ideal world, most of us want more from our jobs than just a paycheck. We want things like work satisfaction, a connection to our coworkers and the opportunity to make a difference. What can give us the kind of feeling

Guides & CoursesOct 27, 2015
The Complete Buffer Guide to Social Media Success: A 10-Day Email Course to Boost Your Results

Anyone is capable of mastering social media marketing. You can take a huge leap forward in just 10 days. We’re grateful for the opportunity to be immersed in social media marketing here at Buffer, developing our best processes and systems for building a social media marketing machine. And we’d love to share our blueprint with you. Join us for an action-packed 10-day email course to learn exactly how we manage social media marketing here

OpenOct 26, 2015
The Founder’s Paradox: When Thinking Big Holds You Back

While building Buffer , there have been times when things have started to go a little crazy. It might be being featured in a big blog, seeing lots of tweets about us , or noticing a big influx of signups or upgrades . When this happens, it is very easy for my thoughts to drift off and to start thinking of the big-picture possibilities for us, long into the future. It may

ReportsOct 23, 2015
50 Teammates, 17 Open Roles, New Calendar View & More: Buffer’s September Update

We reached the 50 team members mark in September! This feels like a big milestone and a special moment to reflect on. For me, the most exciting part of this is that 50 people are able to join our journey of working as a fully distributed team, where you choose to live and work from the place which makes you happiest and most productive. We’ve had several examples of teammates moving or traveling to find their happy place, or being able to move easily to help and be with their significant other

Guides & CoursesOct 23, 2015
The Complete Guide to New Twitter Polls: What They Are, How They Work and 9 Ways to Use Them

Twitter has long been the place to turn for opinions on everything from who will win tonight’s game to ideas for your next blog post. And now it’s just become even easier to gather opinions from your audience on Twitter. With the release of its new Polls feature (available to all Twitter accounts in the coming days), you can now create super-simple polls directly on Twitter with just the click of a button or a tap on your phone. We can’

We’ve Lost Nearly Half Our Social Referral Traffic in the Last 12 Months

This is a little tough to admit. I’ve been failing at social media marketing. It feels weird admitting this, too: We as a Buffer marketing team—working on a product that helps people succeed on social media—have yet to figure out how to get things working on Facebook (especially), Twitter, Pinterest, and more. And that’s super scary to admit. What’s happening? I wish I knew! We’ve got lots of theories as to what’s be

OpenOct 21, 2015
How to Work 40 Hours in 16.7 (The Simple Technique That Gave Me My Life Back)

I used to work a lot— 60, 80, or even 100 hours a week… I let my work be a big part of how I defined myself. I wore those insane hours like a badge of honor…I loved telling people how “busy” I was…and how much I “had to do”. Sound familiar? Looking back, I realize I used my work to try and fill a void in myself. The problem was that this void was like a black hole. No matter how many hours I worked [https://blog.bufferapp.com/optimal-work-time-how-long-should-we-work-every-day-the-science-of

Tips / How ToOct 20, 2015
The 21 Social Media Conversations You’re Going to Face: How to Master Them All

On social media—whether you’re a business , a brand , or an individual—you’ll likely come across plenty of different conversations — each presenting a unique challenge. For instance: How do you appease an angry commenter? How do you handle a technical question? What to do with a troll? It can feel overwhelming. If you take a step back and examine the emotions

OpenOct 20, 2015
We’ve Changed Our Product Team Structure 4 Times: Here’s Where We Are Today

Hi there! This is an older post that we’ve kept around for transparency but that means that sometimes the information is no longer accurate. Head to our homepage to view our most recent posts. How do people work best together? It’s fun to think about. You may know some things about your own work style and productivity preferences—for example, do you prefer solo or team projects? Being in the middle of many tasks or finishing one before going on to the next? Now, take all those unique fa

Buffer NewsOct 15, 2015
500,000 Beautiful Social Media Images Later: Introducing Pablo 2.0, Perfect Images to Fit All Networks

Since we launched our Pablo image creation product in the spring, Pablo designers have created more than 500,000 images! And we’ve been excited to work toward making Pablo even more useful. Today we’re thrilled to announce Pablo 2.0 , the simplest way to create beautiful images that fit every social network perfectly. We’ve expanded Pablo’s function

OpenOct 15, 2015
Self Defined Self Management: How Our Startup Is Figuring It Out Together

Self-management was a bold and unique experience that we’re glad to have tried at Buffer. We learned a lot! Here are some of our self-management lessons as well as our current approach with natural hierarchy. When I got my first job, it never occurred to me that there was more than one way to work. You went to an office, followed directions from a boss for 8-ish hours, and then went home. That’s not quite how Buffer does things. During the time I’ve been lucky enough to be on board, we’ve ex

AdvertisingOct 14, 2015
4 Ways Facebook Lead Ads Can Change the Social Advertising Game

Facebook lead ads are here! Facebook has rolled out a new form of advertising that’s now available to marketers everywhere. Lead ads make the process seamless for marketers to ask for info like emails, names, job titles, and more. The process is smooth and easy for Facebook users, too, as they never need to leave Facebook. (It’s very similar to how a Twitter lead gen card might work.) I find this p

After Growing to 50 People, We’re Ditching the Office Completely: Here’s Why

Buffer hit a new milestone recently, but it wasn’t a metric like annual recurring revenue, total users or cash in the bank. In fact, this one is more of a philosophical milestone: We closed down our office. Now, since our startup operates with a fully distributed team, it might seem a bit odd that we ever had an office to begin with. But for a variety of reasons, many distributed startups still have a physical office: Automattic, GitHub and Basecamp are a few examples. Here’s how we came to

Tips / How ToOct 13, 2015
How to Understand and Maximize Your Reach on Any Social Network

Have you ever wondered what percentage of people actually see your Tweets or Facebook posts? The data shows it can be as low as 2%. This is in line with our findings at Buffer — on average our 10 most recent Facebook posts have reached around 2.4% of our fans with our highest reaching post being seen by 5.25%. When you work hard to produce and share great content, it’d be great if people could see it! I’m excited to share some things we’ve found that can help your content break through and re

OpenOct 12, 2015
How I Try to Lead When Everything Is Changing

“Perhaps the CEO’s most important operational responsibility is designing and implementing the communication architecture for her company.” — Ben Horowitz Buffer has recently grown to more than 50 people during our fastest 2 months of growth ever. I’ve found that a lot changes when you grow to this size, and any time the team grows quickly. There are a bunch of challenges and it’s also invigorating. It might be the most exciting and toughest phase of build

Online MarketingOct 12, 2015
How to Use Evernote for Productivity, Marketing, and More

So much to do, so little time . I imagine many marketers might feel this way, what with all the wonderful hats we all get to wear. One of my favorite fixes for helping stay organized is Evernote . There are so many ways to use the app and since we talk a lot about productivity here [https://buffer.com/resources/the-big-list-of-ifttt-recipes-for-social-media/

Online MarketingOct 9, 2015
Why We’re Pivoting the Buffer Blog — Again! — And All We’ve Learned So Far

The Buffer blog brings in 10x the traffic of the Open blog. It has 50x the reach of our email courses. A single post on the blog reaches more people in a day than we reach on Facebook in two weeks. It is our greatest marketing asset. And we just keep changing it. We’re pivoting right now, as we speak! The latest change, which I’m excited to share below, fits with this remarkable culture of experimentation, where there are no sacred cows or off-limits areas. Everything is on the table to impro

ReportsOct 9, 2015
Hiring in September: More Than 50 Teammates, More Guidance Through Bootcamp

September was a great month at Buffer! We extended 6 offers for new team members to join us in Buffer’s bootcamp. As a result, we are now more than 50 team members (accounting for both full time team members and bootcampers—you can see the full list over here). September hiring conversations Here’s at look at the September numbers. Our “Total Conversations” are the number of email conversations we have open (we sometime have duplicates), “Customers” are our applicants and “New Conversations”

OpenOct 8, 2015
5 Times We Failed at Diversity Big Time (and How We Fixed it)

One of the first blog posts I ever wrote at Buffer is this beginner’s guide to SEO. When published originally, it had the title “Beginner’s Guide to SEO Even Your Mom Can Understand.” Holy casual sexism! When I think of all the amazing women and moms I know in search optimization and search marketing (here’s a primer on just a few), I am still super embarrassed to have made this giant mistake even nearly 2 years later. I’d like to think I and the whole team at Buffer have come a long way sinc

Self-ImprovementOct 7, 2015
The Best Advice on Writing: 36 Inspiring Quotes for Banishing Doubt and Fear

The psyche of a writer bounces wildly, hourly, from confidence to self-doubt, certainty to fear, love to angst. Wild times like these call for reassurance. Here are some of the reminders I keep for myself, 36 quotes to remind myself that writing is completely worthwhile, entirely fulfilling, and all the best kinds of difficult. The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself. – Walter Benjamin Annie Dillard has said that da